Enough to Kill a Horse (19 page)

While the drive lasted, she and Kit hardly spoke to one another. Laura made use of the time to prepare the line that she meant to take with him. Taking a cigarette from her case without offering one to Kit and lighting it herself, she sat with her head turned away from him, looking out of the car window, as if she were wholly occupied in watching the new, pale shimmer of green on the hawthorn hedges.

There was no sign in her today of the panic and hysteria that she had revealed in her interview with Clare Forwood. She was as well groomed as usual, her dark hair sleek, her makeup delicate and careful. Her uneasiness and her thoughtfulness showed only in the rigidity of her rather expressionless face, and presently, when she stubbed out her cigarette, in the flash of savagery that went into the gesture.

Kit, without commenting on it, saw this and his eyelids twitched again.

The room that he had booked for her at The Waggoners was, as he had said, not luxurious. It was at the top of a narrow, steep staircase, which led up from The Waggoners’ side entrance, which opened out on a small courtyard, where dustbins stood. There was a brass bedstead in the room, a marble-topped washstand with a basin and jug upon it, a dressing-table set in front of the window, and shiny oilcloth on the floor. Laura looked pointedly at the small black iron grate, in which a carefully arranged fan of white paper implied that the landlady had no intention of lighting a fire.

In a falsely gentle tone, she remarked, ‘Well, it’s clean.’

Kit shrugged and said, ‘Sorry, the best I could do.’

‘Oh, of course,’ she said, still smoothly and gently, ‘I didn’t expect anything better.’

Sitting down on the edge of the bed, she drew her fur jacket closely around her, then lit another cigarette.

‘I suppose you want me to explain what I said on the telephone yesterday,’ she said.

Kit had grasped the brass rail at the foot of the bed with both hands.

‘Not particularly,’ he said. ‘Clare Forwood came down in the evening. I heard the whole thing from her.’

‘Ah yes, Clare Forwood … I’m sorry now that I went to her.’ As Laura changed her position slightly the wire mattress sang under her. ‘I suppose you’re furious with me. You don’t see my point of view at all.’

‘As it happens,’ Kit said, ‘I see it perfectly, and in case you’re interested, I moved out on Fanny and Basil last night.’

Something gleamed in Laura’s eyes, perhaps satisfaction, perhaps simply astonishment. Whichever it was, it was quickly, and with determination, extinguished.

‘So then you agree with me,’ she said in a level tone.

‘I do not,’ Kit said.

‘I’m afraid I don’t understand, then.’

‘I do not think Fanny’s a murderess.’

‘I wonder,’ she said musingly, ‘what the law is on the point. If you attempt to murder one person but accidentally kill someone else instead, is that only manslaughter? I don’t really think so.’

Kit’s grip on the brass rail was making the bed rock.

‘I’m trying to tell you,’ he said in the hectoring tone that comes easily to anyone unused to explaining difficult thoughts, ‘I see your point of view although I think you’re wrong. I know Fanny didn’t try to kill you. But because of this queer kink of yours, not being able to taste this phenyl-whatsit, I mean, just because of a silly sort of coincidence like that, I understand your being afraid that she tried to. But you’re wrong.’

‘In that case, why did you move out?’ Laura asked.

‘Because Fanny was being damned stupid too and it got on my nerves.’

‘If you think I’m stupid …’

‘Besides, I’m engaged to you. I naturally stood up for you.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ she said remotely. ‘I – I didn’t feel sure that you would.’

Kit reddened. ‘But there’s something I’ve got to make you see before you do any more damage – ’

‘Damage?’ she cut in.

‘Like going to Clare Forwood with a story like that against Fanny. And like going to the police with it.
Have
you been to the police with it?’

She drew at her cigarette before she answered, puffed out the smoke and said quietly, ‘No.’

‘Well, don’t go, then. Because if you do, I’ll have to move in again with Fanny and Basil and – and I don’t believe that you want that, do you?’

‘But why should you have to do that?’

‘Can’t you see how it would look? You accuse my sister of murder and I choose just that time to leave her. It’d be quite impossible.’

‘But if I’m right?’

‘You aren’t, I’ve told you.’

Laura stood up and began to move about the cold, clean, depressing room, looking for an ashtray. Failing to find one, she tipped her ash into a pink and white china hair-tidy on the dressing-table.

‘And suppose I don’t go to the police?’ she said.

‘I – I should be grateful,’ Kit said.

‘And not go back?’

‘No.’

‘And come with me to London?’

‘Well, as soon – as soon as I could.’

‘You mean, after the inquest.’

‘No, I mean as soon as I’m sure Fanny can get on without me.’

Laura flung both hands out in a gesture of extreme impatience. ‘I simply don’t understand you,’ she said.

‘You tell me you’ve made up your mind to leave her, but then you say you’re going to go on hanging around until you’re certain she can get on without you. At that rate, don’t you realize, you’ll never be able to leave. She’ll see that you don’t.’

‘No – you don’t understand,’ Kit said. ‘For one thing, it was Fanny who told me to get out last night. I don’t think I told you that.’

‘I don’t think you did. But I don’t think either that it makes the least difference, because I’m sure she never believed for a moment that you’d go. Though, as a matter of fact, it does mean that you’re even more free to leave her than I thought.’

‘It doesn’t, it doesn’t mean a thing,’ Kit said, ‘because I don’t think she knew what she was saying. And the point is, I’ve been doing a job for her. I’ve been running that antique show of hers and if I leave suddenly she’ll simply have to close down.’

‘Well, why not? She and Basil don’t need the money.’

‘No, but she does need something – something that’s her own, to interest her. You didn’t know her in the old days when she was on the stage and before she got it into her head that she’d got to turn countrified and domesticated. In other words, before she married Basil. She was – she was so awfully different then. She was slim and full of life and always doing something. But now, if she hadn’t got her antique business, she’d do nothing at all and simply go to pieces. I know she would. And it’d be my fault and I couldn’t stand that. So I’ve got to stick around – I really have, Laura – until she’s got things sorted out somehow and found somebody to take my place.’

‘Which she’ll be careful not to do!’

‘She will when she understands that I mean what I say.’

‘Well, well!’ Laura said with an angry laugh. ‘So all this time that you’ve been clinging to Fanny, you’ve managed to convince yourself that it was the other way round and that she couldn’t get on without you. You know, you begin to remind me of my husband, Charles. He had a mother. Such a sweet old dear – oh yes – there was nothing she wouldn’t have done for him. But she’d eaten him alive. I did my best to cut him free of her and put a little energy and ambition into him – I can’t bear a man without ambition – but all he really wanted was to sit around with her, being told how wonderful he was and how little I appreciated him. And all the time he used to tell me how lonely she was and how she’d break to pieces if he didn’t look after her. It was quite ludicrous. And it was the thing that killed him, because if he hadn’t insisted on spending one of his leaves with her instead of with me and the baby, he wouldn’t have been in the house with her when it was bombed.’

Kit had watched her while she was speaking with growing surprise.

‘But I always thought,’ he said, ‘you always let me think, that you’d been awfully in love with him. But you weren’t. You hated him.’

‘I didn’t, I was in love with him!’ she cried. ‘I’d have come to hate him if he hadn’t died, but I loved him at first. He was very good-looking and very clever and I knew he could easily become someone who amounted to something – that is, I believed he had the gifts for it. We were both very young, of course, much too young to have married, but I had tremendous faith in him. That was before I knew his mother. Later I – ’

‘Laura!’ Kit said loudly, breaking in harshly on her flow of words. ‘I’m never going to amount to anything. You know that, don’t you?’

She gave him a bewildered look, as if the interruption had made her lose the thread of her thoughts. But then her face softened suddenly. She moved towards him.

‘We’ll see about that,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’ve begun to know yourself yet, my dear.’

‘I know myself pretty well,’ he answered. ‘I haven’t got gifts of any kind. I’m not ambitious.’

‘Wait and see,’ she said. ‘Wait and see what happens to you when you’ve got away from Fanny.’

‘No,’ he said, ‘that won’t change. I’ll work and I’ll make enough for us to live on, but that’s all you can expect.’

‘Aren’t you leaving me out of account? There are a great many things I can do for you. I’m not so young and ignorant as I was when I married Charles. I’ve got quite a lot of influence in certain places. I know lots of people.’

‘Like Sir Peter Poulter.’

Her body stiffened. For an instant her eyes looked glazed with fury. Yet Kit had said the words almost casually and as if he had no sense of saying anything with outrageous implications.

In the same tone he went on, ‘People like that aren’t going to have any use for me, Laura. I’ll try to do anything you want, that’s to say, as soon as things are straightened out here I’ll go to London with you and find myself a job there – provided, of course, that you don’t go to the police with your crazy idea about Fanny – but you’ve got to understand it’s no good expecting anything much of me. Do you understand that?’

She stood there as if she were thinking over carefully what he had been saying. Then she reached out her arms and slid them round his neck.

‘Kit,’ she said with her face close to his, ‘Kit darling, aren’t we being fools?’

‘But you do understand – ?’

‘Of course I understand. And we’re being fools, because we’re almost quarrelling, just at a time when we should be helping each other most. Let’s stop it and be nice to each other.’

He gave her a light kiss on the cheek, then drew away from her.

‘All right, what would you like to do?’ he asked.

For a moment she looked put out, but then said briskly, ‘Let’s go for a walk. It’s a lovely morning. But first would you go and find the landlady and tell her that I’ve simply got to have a fire here. I’ll unpack a few things and change my shoes while you’re gone.’

‘All right,’ Kit said again, looking relieved.

He went out and went looking for Mrs Toles, the landlady.

She was serving the first few customers in the bar and it seemed to Kit, as he came in, that she and the others there were all of them talking as fast as they could, and all at the same time, but that on his appearance there was a sudden silence. Then they all began to talk again excitedly and with an air of congratulation about them, while somebody gave Kit a slap on the back.

Mrs Toles’s voice, used to authority in her own bar, carried above the rest.

‘So they’ve got them, Mr Raven. Now we can all rest easy, and I must say, for your sister’s sake and Mr Lynam’s too, we’re all right glad. You’ll tell them that from me, won’t you? They must have been suffering something terrible, poor souls, worrying their hearts out over what could have happened. That’s what I’d have done if I thought that someone had got something to eat or drink here in my hotel that wasn’t right and made them sick, let alone them dying of it. But now they don’t have to worry about it no more and we were all saying, just as you came in, how glad we are to hear it.’

Kit looked from one face to another. Heads were nodded at him and broad, ruddy faces smiled.

‘That’s right,’ Fred Davin, the ironmonger, said. He had left his shop to look after itself even earlier than usual, and come in, apparently to celebrate.

‘You mean they’ve arrested someone for Poulter’s death?’ Kit said.

‘That’s right,’ several people said at once.

Mrs Toles went on, ‘It’s those two who looked after him, poor old soul. They knew they’d got something coming to them in his will and of course they hoped they could put the blame on Mr and Mrs Lynam. And I must say, it’s what I thought all along. I said so, didn’t I, Mr Davin? They aren’t local people, that’s what I said. What do any of us know about them, I said. You wait and see, that’s who they’ll be arresting. I said that, didn’t I?’

Fred Davin nodded. ‘They found the arsenic in the gardening shed, you see. Spilled on the floor, careless like. I reckon they never knew it was there.’

‘But what about the phenylthiourea?’ Kit asked.

‘The what?’

Kit coloured. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Just something – an idea someone had. It doesn’t mean anything now. I wasn’t thinking.’ He was almost incoherent and if anyone had looked at his big strong hands, hanging at his sides, he would have seen that they were trembling.

Forgetting all about asking Mrs Toles for a fire for Laura’s room, Kit turned on his heel and went running upstairs.

The words that had been ready to pour out of him when he saw Laura were cut off by the sight of her face. She was standing by the window, holding aside the lace curtain and peering out. There was a look of intense excitement about her. Her eyes were glittering and her mouth was twisted in a strange, tight-lipped smile.

‘Come here quick!’ she exclaimed. ‘Quick – tell me, who’s that, Kit?’

He came to her side and looked out of the window.

In the street below, walking along with a shopping basket on one arm, was a slim bareheaded figure, wearing a loose grey coat buttoned high to the neck and somehow suggesting, by its severity or else because of something in the personality of the wearer, the habit of a nun.

‘There was a man with her just now, but he went into the tobacconist’s,’ Laura went on. ‘Who is she, Kit? Do you know her?’